Silicon Snake Oil

by Clifford Stoll
Reviewed by Mike Eisenberg (March, 1999)

Alongside the history of technological enthusiasm, there is an
almost equally vigorous parallel history of technological critique.
The tradition is as old as Plato, who wrote disparagingly of the
value of the written word (note the irony there!) in the Phaedrus;
and it has continued in the writings of (among many others) William
Blake, Henry David Thoreau, Mary Shelley, and Lewis Mumford. The
tradition has, if anything, flourished in the age of the computer.
Indeed, to speak of "the computer" is too gross an abstraction: the
instrument has presented a variety of different looks to the public
over the past fifty years, and each new look-electronic brain,
office leviathan, video game screen, window to the Internet-has
spawned its own round of critique. Much of this writing-like
Postman's Technopoly, or Slouka's War of the Worlds,
is provocative and disturbing; some, like Weizenbaum's Computer
Power and Human Reason or Roszak's The Cult of
Information, is still provocative, though annoying. Clifford
Stoll's book Silicon Snake Oil is, unfortunately, not even
good enough to be annoying. It is essentially a 200-plus page
top-of-the-head ramble on way too many subjects-the Internet,
computers in the classroom, electronic card catalogs, email,
cryptography-and the result is an intermittently informative
hodgepodge with no coherence, no narrative path, and almost no
sense of literature or history. When Stoll mentions, at the close
of the book, that Silicon Snake Oil grew from scribbled
notes on the back of an envelope, that admission explains a
lot.

Stoll's basic mode of argument throughout the book is to compare
two functionally-related technologies-one computational (e.g.,
email) and one less so (e.g., the U.S. postal service), and to
point out several positive aspects of the latter that are missing
in the former. For instance, in the case of email-vs.-the post
office, Stoll argues that the post office allows a variety of
unorthodox styles of addressing (e.g., an envelope with a picture
of Alfred E. Neuman will be delivered to Mad Magazine); the
post office is more reliable and faster than people generally give
it credit for; physical letters have a marvelous sentimental value;
and so on. There are similar comparisons of libraries with and
without computerized card catalogs; darkrooms versus Photoshop; and
typewriters versus word processors. Just to take the last of these
as yet another example: Stoll writes of his Sears mechanical
typewriter that

It came with a dustcover, a spare ribbon, and a cute bottle of
oil. For a hundred and fifty dollars, it's entirely adequate for
business applications. It delivers instant hard copy, never
crashes, handles envelopes with ease, and anyone can adjust the
margins. The sixteen-page instruction booklet includes diagrams of
where to place your fingers, how to tab, and a drawing of correct
posture. The carrying case even has handles.

There are several things that need to be said about this style
of argument. First, it is hilariously easy-you can do a comparison
of this sort to show, say, that the Ptolemaic picture of the solar
system is preferable to the Copernican (the former provides a
healthier sense of confidence in the importance of humankind, it
trains young minds in thinking about the geometric intricacies of
epicycles, and it's surprisingly useful in navigation). Or, if you
like, you can show that the harpsichord is preferable to the piano
(the former has a much statelier sound to it, and harpsichord music
sounds all wrong when played on the piano). Or... well, you can try
this yourself. The point is not that there aren't interesting
things to say about any of these comparisons, but rather that
Stoll's reflexive use of the "set-difference" technique-find
whatever is in technology A that is not in technology B, and bemoan
its loss-doesn't constitute much more than the beginning of an
analysis.

The other thing that is strange about Stoll's use of this type
of argument is his shifting view of what counts as "technology"
versus "real life", or as "authentic" versus "inauthentic." This
causes some oddly (and presumably unintentionally) ironic passages:
Stoll mentions "the warmth of a voice across the telephone line"
[p. 79] and states that "it's almost always faster to fax a
single-page letter than to send Internet e-mail." [p. 16] As the
book proceeds, and the examples proliferate, the reader may well
experience a growing difficulty in remembering which technologies
Stoll approves of, and which he doesn't, and which he is sort of
ambivalent about. Certainly, many of his contrasts between
computer-mediated experience and "real life" sound like they could
equally well be made about reading and "real life". After all, the
stereotypical bookworm is someone who has a dearth of physical
experiences (he or she is more likely to read about the
constellation Orion than to go outside at night and observe it);
the too-avid reader is missing out on a variety of warm human
interactions; much of the material printed in books is outdated,
poorly written, mistaken, or even pernicious. Yet Stoll has (as far
as I remember) only good things to say about the abstract symbols
that appear in books and few good things to say about the abstract
symbols that happen to appear on screens.

A corollary of the book's haphazard structure and style is that
almost all of it is polemic, unburdened by any research beyond
brief introspection. Thus, when Stoll writes sentences like:

"Computer networks isolate us from one another, rather than
bring us together." [p. 58]

"Computers teach us to withdraw, to retreat into the warm
comfort of their false reality." [p. 137]

"[C]omputers punish [those who are] imaginative and inventive by
constraining them to prescribed channels of thought and action."[p.
46]

he offers no foundation in research, no explanation based in
psychology or physiology or any relevant field, and no thoughtful
comparison with what we might know of other technologies (do
computers "teach us to withdraw" more than, say, books or movies?).
This style of argument-by-fiat is, unfortunately, unlikely to do
anything more than preach to the converted.

Silicon Snake Oil does have its better moments. Like a
widely scattered fog that deposits a fine mist over everything in
its path, the book occasionally does light upon something new and
interesting. The discussion of the shifting formats of databases,
for example, and the resulting difficulty of retrieving stored
information, is the beginning of an important argument. And Stoll's
description of the impact of computer databases on the practice of
scientific research-he is an astronomer by profession-is especially
useful; when he writes about the limitations of computer models,
he's clearly drawing on a long professional history of reflection
on the subject. Even here, though, it's a bit frustrating to see
how brief and almost exclusively personalized the discussion of the
subject is. (A book detailing the impact of computer models, for
better or worse, on the practice of scientific research over the
last two decades would be a much harder read than Stoll's book, but
a much more rewarding one.)

Besides these occasional high spots, though, Silicon Snake
Oil offers little sustenance. The style of writing is (to this
eye) marred by the self-consciously folksy tone (the use of "'em",
as in "give 'em hell" is overdone, and one "Yowsa" is enough for
any book). The bibliography is strangely perfunctory, listing only
a few book titles without publishers or dates. Indeed, the few
books that are mentioned are all over the place-why are we pointed
to Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death and Mander's Four
Arguments for the Elimination of Television, both of which are
about television and not about computers? And why not (say)
Weizenbaum, or Turkle, or Slouka, or Birkerts, or Cuban? And the
less said about chapter 12 1/2, the better; let's just say that it
would have been a better decision to leave it out altogether.

The various and protean forms of the computer need their
technological critics. We need a Plato to look at the Internet
(where it is and where it's headed); databases and their fragility;
the impact of computational media on scientific thinking; the
impact of email-writing on children's literacy and on their social
styles; the use of computer simulations in classrooms; and many
more. Stoll's book doesn't meet that need.